The speech of US State Department official to students has boiled up as a serious concern here. Kevin Maher is the head of the Japanese affairs office who speaks fluent Japanese and has a Japanese wife. Briefly, he reportedly said “Okinawans are masters of manipulation and extortion, and they are too lazy to grow goya vegetable.” This may be an evidence of their mindset still occupying Okinawa after the war. Our JDP Cabinet, being foreign affairs amateur, protested to US Ambassador John Roos over the phone when the Ambassador made an inquiry call. Always reactive... If in China, they would surely call up to bring Japanese Ambassador Niwa in the midnight.

When it comes to Okinawa and foreign affairs in Japan, professor Kei Wakaizumi comes up in my mind who acted as secret negotiator of Prime Minister Sato and dealt with Kissinger in the background focusing on Okinawa’s reversion in 1972. The hidden precise details are revealed in his book “The Best Course Available”. I guess I am not the only one who think the international negotiations won’t move forward without such determination and confidence as he maintained. It is interesting to see the author enjoyed a sense of resonance to two scholars of English literature, Yoshio Nakano and Tsuneari Fukuda on their views over foreign diplomacy in the book:“Nothing is as dreadful as documentation of foreign affairs. It may sound slightly exaggerated, but an instant of negligence cannot be tolerated. The most dangerous is to promote a sweet dream of possibly receivable good intensions to the mind of our people.”“Democracy is the system of government to disclose trivial sort of things in order to hide the most important issues.”